Air Crew: 25 Missions. The Story of the Memphis Belle - Bombardier.

CAPTAIN VINCENT B. EVANS
Bombardier

A genial Texan, 23 years old, one of the two married members of the crew. From five miles up in the substratosphere, precision bombing is a fine art. The Eighth Air Force knows him as one of the best. Before going in the Army in January, 1942, he operated a fleet of trucks in Fort Worth.

HIS STORY

AMERICAN bombing skill and equipment are the best the world has ever seen. There is no question about that. They all marvel at the results we get from high altitude bombing. And I am convinced that the German war machine will be destroyed by daylight, precision bombing from high altitudes.

When you go after one specific small target - not a whole plant, but one building in a plant - find your target, and put your bombs right on it, you are doing some real bombing. There's no guesswork about it. And that's what the Americans are doing day after day.

As for my job as bombardier, I wouldn't trade with anybody. Of course, I would like to be a pilot too, but if I had it to do over again I would sign up for bombardier training. It's the greatest thrill in the world to see your bombs hit the target.

I would like to see our schools place more emphasis on high altitude bombing training. Also, our training should concentrate more on pilot-bombardier teams, teaching them to work together, and less on individual training. Bombing problems should be given - real problems, like bombing Denver from Seattle. That would be a great help to the boys in preparing them for combat.

Student bombardiers should be given more practice in photographic and map reading. I didn't get any of that in school. They should be given more pilotage navigation training. Every member of a B-17 crew should learn other duties besides his own. The four officers should be able to inter-change.

A fellow who doesn't finish near the top of his class shouldn't get discouraged. The fact that a man leads his class in school doesn't mean that he will be the best bombardier or pilot. You just can't tell until you try him in combat.

(At this point Captain Evans was asked to re-late his experience in the St. Nazaire raid of January 3. For that performance he was awarded the Air Medal.)

It was a building that we were after that day. It was a small target, but very important and we were glad of the opportunity to lead the Eighth Bomber Command. As we turned to make a run on the target, which I knew by its relation to other buildings, we ran into a strong wind which we hadn't anticipated. That caused the plane to go wide on the initial point and also caused our ground speed to drop to 85 or 90 miles an hour. There we were sitting up there like clay pigeons.

I told Captain Morgan and Colonel Putnam (Lieutenant Colonel C. E. Putnam, also of Fort Worth, who was riding as co-pilot and wing leader), that it was going to be a long run. They said let's settle down on it. We were anxious to get it right.

We had a 2 1/2-minute run. The usual one is about 55 seconds. We were really sweating out the last few seconds of that run. The flak was terrific. I could see the flashes of the antiaircraft fire through my bombsight and occasionally a fighter crossing underneath. I could hear flak slapping the side of the ship like kicking the door of a model-T Ford. Later we discovered that we had a lot of holes in the ship, and a tire was blown to hell.

Captain Morgan asked me when the hell I was going to drop the bombs. I told him to take it easy.

I put my cross-hairs where I knew the target to be, although I couldn't make it out at that distance. The second I released the bombs, I knew they were going to be good. The bombardier can usually tell. They were squarely on the target.

(Captain Evans put it modestly. Actually, photo-graphs showed that the mean point of impact was only 10 or 15 feet off the center of the target, a torpedo shed.)

THE new Automatic Flight Control Equipment will be a means of shortening the bombing run. When we went over, they hadn't perfected AFCE. Bob (Captain Morgan) and I worked so well together that we were able to do all right manually.

Now that AFCE has been perfected, I certainly would recommend it to other crews. We have tried it and found it to work very well.

Here's a tip that will help: When you first turn on the target, take out the big corrections by talking the pilot over, using the interphone, before clutching in. Then you will have only minor corrections to make.

Bombardiers would do well to spend a lot of time in the bombsight vault talking to enlisted men. I figure that I have learned 30 percent of my knowledge of the bombsight from commissioned officers, 30 per cent from actual experience, and 40 per cent from enlisted men in the bomb-sight vault. These master sergeants can really put you wise to a lot of things.

I believe in dropping on the leader. It is the only way to keep the formation closed for maxi-mum fire power. Of course, it puts the monkey on the lead bombardier's back. It makes me nervous to think about it.